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Creating a Ghost Blog on Azure Websites

I’m running a blog at GeeksWithBlogs (GWB) for more than 7 years as of this writing and so far it has been great. It’s been months since I thought of moving into a new blog but didn’t get the chance to work on it because of the busy stuff that’s going on in my life and work. While GWB offers some features for managing your blog, it also has downsides such as the built-in editor, limited themes and most especially the lack of “responsiveness”. These reasons are the main factors that urged me to push my plan on moving to a brand new blog. Fortunately, I manage to make some time on making this into a reality.

This post will walk you through the step-by-step process on how to create a blog on azure websites.

What is Ghost?

Ghost is an Open Source application which allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do. It's simple, elegant, and designed so that you can spend less time making your blog work and more time blogging.

Why Ghost?

Simply because I only need a blogging platform that is simple, neat and powerful. Adding to that, Ghost uses something called Markdown for writing. Essentially, it's a shorthand way to manage your post formatting as you write.

Down to the road

As you may know there are many possible ways to install a blog in azure. You could either install it from the azure website’s gallery or by doing a custom install. Installing it via gallery is the simplest and it is good for bloggers who will just post anything on the web. The custom installation is intended for developers who want to explore code and customize the project based on your needs. Another simple way of installing Ghost is using the Deploy to Azure quick install. In this post I’m going to show how we’re going to use the “deploy to azure” installation.

Now head over to the official GitHub repository for Ghost to Azure. At the read-me section you should be able to see this:

Click on the “Deploy to Azure" button to start installing Ghost. It should take you to the following form below:

Supply the necessary fields above and make sure to verify each field before moving to next step. Once you are sure about the information you entered then click Next. On the next window click Deploy. You should be able to see the following screen while the deployment process is going on:

And here’s the screen shot after the process was completed:

Now you can start managing your site or visiting it by clicking on the generated url above. Here’s the sample blog site.